‘Take me with you’: Learning to live with an absent father

I feel the sobs in the back of my throat. It’s a salty welling up that I somehow
manage to choke down. I tell myself, “No. Not here. Not this. He doesn’t get to
ruin any more days of your life.”

Why would I cry for the loss of someone who has never been more than a ghost in
the first place?

It’s been two months since I learned my estranged father had died. Five years
since I last tried to contact him. Eight since I last laid eyes on him. For over
two decades I’ve lived without a dad, telling myself I never needed one anyway;
that “daddy issues” was an excuse for weaker girls too wrapped up in themselves.

When I learned of his death I went numb. I couldn’t cry then because I didn’t
know how to mourn a stranger. But two months later, two decades of emotion came
pouring out at one of the worst moments possible.

At a wedding, as the father/daughter dance begins, I hear a voice inside my head
whisper, “That’s another thing you’ll never get.” Then, as I see the face of the
father of the bride – all joy and all sad – something inside me breaks. The
floodgates open, and I rush to the edge of the nearby ocean where I stand,
doubled over and heaving until my boyfriend finds me.

‘I haven’t seen my father since I was
seven’

The thing about estranged parents is no one really gets it unless they’ve lived
it. It’s full of rage and loss and unanswered questions; that other parents
stick around because they liked their kids more. It’s not the same as a divorce
where you get two Christmases or a parent who died. Death is clean, simple.
Having to explain “I haven’t seen my father since I was seven” is rarely clean
and never simple.

For the most part I had a loving, fairly privileged childhood: swimming and
skating and snowboarding and even horseback riding. My grandparents were deeply
involved in my life, and most of the time I felt as though it was enough to make
Father’s Day cards for my grandpa, a man who bankrupted himself to set my mother
up when my father left her destitute.

I don’t know how much my image of my father is created from the hate that
neither my mother or my grandfather never let go. Only my grandmother ever had a
kind word to utter about him, a soothing word when the vitriol of the other two
adults in my life had me questioning whether having his blood in my veins
somehow made be half bad too.

They always told me I looked more like him than them, and sometimes my mother,
caught up in her own grief or frustrated with me, would spew, “Maybe you should
just go live with your father in Florida.”

It was the worst insult my family could level.

My older brother took on a heavy burden, filling the fridge and caring for me
when my grandmother couldn’t. But he was so filled with his own teenage angst
and hate for my father’s abandonment that he could hardly help bring things into
focus for me. And so the image of my father remained fuzzy at best, flashes of
memory and likely constructed moments based on others’ interpretations of
decades-old events.

‘Take me with you’

It’s my fifth birthday party, and my mom is mad. Dad is late. “As usual,” she
says. But when he arrives he brings with him a big red carrying case, with a
tape player and a series of books on tape for me. I loved it, and it wouldn’t
leave my side for the next week of our family vacation.

That Caribbean cruise is the only clear memory I have of my family together. I
have earlier, blurrier recollections of fights and ice hitting glasses and
drinks being poured and crying into my pillow. But that week on a boat was
magical. I spent my days playing with other kids and evenings with my family,
where my parents tease me about the little boy in the other family who likes to
dance with me.

I didn’t know it then, but we were living an upper-middle-class mirage. My
father’s business was sinking as quickly as my parents’ marriage. A few weeks
later, I walk into the family room because the sound of my parents fighting has
woken me. My mom is doubled over on the couch, sobbing, her jet-black hair
slicked back in a headband. She’s wearing a white nightgown with flowers on it.
My dad is fully dressed in a yellow polo shirt with blue stripes. He’s holding a
duffle bag and says something along the lines of “Oh good, you woke the kids. I
wanted to do this without that.”

I follow them out to the car and my parents exchange words. “Take me with you,”
I remember thinking. I also remember the curves of his little red BMW, and the
feel of the rough pink brick of our driveway on my feet.

I’ve been told that
before that night I was a typical “daddy’s girl,” always a little spoiled by my
dad. Friends of my parents told me they always called me “Bonnie Butler,” after
the little girl in Gone With The Wind. When my mother tells me her version of
that night’s events, it ends with her asking my father what we would do in his
absence, and him turning as if to say, “Frankly, my dear,” but leaving her to
finish the famous line.

‘Why won’t my daddy do that?’

It’s Christmas time a few months later and I’m in grade two. I’m excited at the
prospect of at least two visits from Santa Claus (sometimes he went to my
grandparents’ house, too). Dad tells me that Santa knows how much I love puzzles
and treasure hunts, so he’s talked to the Easter Bunny and he’s going to hide my
presents like eggs. “I’ll see you Christmas,” he says, with a kiss on the
forehead and a rumple of my hair as he drops me off at school.

Four days later my father boarded a flight to Florida and never came back.

When Christmas Day rolled around, my mom, brother and grandparents all tried to
tell me he wasn’t coming. But I remember secretly believing he would. Deep in my
heart I knew, I knew, he’d come. He’d promised.

This wasn’t the first time. Every other weekend and Wednesday were supposed to
have been spent at my dad’s apartment. Sometimes, then, he didn’t show up.

Years later, after a few too many drinks at a family friend’s cottage, my mom
admitted she sometimes knew he wasn’t coming, even days in advance, but didn’t
tell me because she wanted me to learn to hate him as much as she did.

And so I learned to hate my father. And I learned how to hide a broken heart,
right up until the moment it can no longer be contained.

A few months after my father left, I’m in a packed hotel room in Buffalo with my
mom, a family friend and her two daughters. We’d just eaten, and Mrs. Doubtfire
came on television. By the time it ends, I’m hysterical. I can’t understand what
was so wrong with me that my dad won’t even try to see me. Won’t write. Won’t
call. And look at all that dad went through to be with his kids: putting on a
dress, playing pretend. “Why won’t my daddy do that?” I sob into my mother’s
arms.

‘He tried to write us’

“He tried to write us, Ashley. He did. But gramps and mom kept them back,” my
brother tries to tell me. I’m now 15 and he’s picked me up from our (his former)
high school.

I don’t believe him, by this time a convert to the family dogma that my father
was the definition of the worst. A philanderer and white collar criminal whose
crimes were committed both against my family and his former employees at his
publishing company.

I feel deflated as I push the Pizza Hut deep dish and salad around on my plate.
I was excited for this lunch. My brother never wanted to do things with me. But
he was only there to tell me he too was a traitor. That he’d gotten back in
touch with our father. He wanted to know if I wanted to come with him for a
visit to Florida.

No, never, nope, I said a million times by the time the soft serve from the
sundae bar was melting between us.

‘Hey there’

Two years later and I’m driving to meet my brother and father somewhere in
Michigan. I’m 19, it’s September. My grandmother had died in June. My nana, as I
called her, was of a generation that would never go against her husband, but she
would also never partake in the vitriol my mother and grandpa reserved for my
father. I’m looking for the answers she always hinted at but never confirmed.

My mom is out of the country, and I feel like a criminal in her car – borrowed
without her consent for a trip I know she’d resent.

I pull into the parking lot of the motel, and take a deep breath. I’m on the
verge of a panic attack. I breathe and I tell myself I can go to my brother’s
room, have a drink, calm down and prepare myself. I’m about to open the door to
the reception area, when a voice behind me says, “Hey there.”

It stirs no depths of memory, but it makes the hair on the back of my neck stand
on end. I turn, slowly, and I know it’s him. My father emerges from behind a
white pillar, with a slight stoop to his significant height, his shoulders
rounded in abashment. I know the posture because it’s what I look like when I
know I’m in the wrong.

My eyes dart wildly around for an escape, but I shift and slouch instead. “Hi,”
I hear myself saying. He hugs me. I want to hug back. I want to scream more. But
instead I just shake a little.

I end up staying overnight even though I didn’t plan on it, but we barely speak
a word the entire time. I take his email and he takes mine.

It’s the last time I see him before he dies.

‘Access to Ashley’

The longest email I ever receive from my father is his version of events that
led him to leave the country in 1994. It goes something like this: the judge in
the divorce had awarded my mother control of their company; he was ordered to
pay an eye-popping amount of child support, but couldn’t afford it without being
able to run the company. He was broke and without any assets to his name by the
settlement. He paints a sob story around his efforts to reach out to us, saying
he was devastated when he never heard back from us. I can’t tell if this is true
or a version of the truth.

Years later, after getting into a master’s of journalism program at Ryerson
University. I send him a note when I remember my mom saying he went there for
his accounting degree. “Yes,” he replies, “because your mother wouldn’t move to
Toronto for my engineering career, so I had to find something I could do in
Waterloo.”

I don’t reply back.

Later that summer, I’m cleaning out an old dresser of my nana’s, and I find a
series of yellowed legal-looking pages against the back of a small drawer. It’s
a letter from my father to my mother dated January 1995, the month after the
Christmas hunt that never happened.

It’s written in semi-legalese, full of reasons for his departure and
requirements for his return. At the top is a request the child support payment
be halved from $6,000 a month to $3,000, then again when my brother Jay turns 18
that year.

And there it is in black and white: “Access to Ashley.” The next line, “And Jay,
if he wants.”

I shake under the weight of the discovery. I’m about to start journalism school,
and in my hand is a document that debunks the most important narrative of my
entire childhood, my father’s villainy.

I send my father a lengthy note explaining what I had found. I apologize for not
believing him sooner. I say I want to open the lines of communication; I want to
come visit. And then I wait for his reply.

It’s not instant, but when it comes, it shatters me all over again. He accuses
me of being my “mother’s agent,” of just “trying to get cash out of him,” and
worse.

‘I could never leave a kid behind like
that’

When my father dies, an estranged cousin searches for me on Facebook, contacting
friends of friends on mutual networks until finally reaching me. She apologizes
for my loss, and I don’t know how to tell her that I’d already mourned the loss
of my father years ago.

All I know for sure about my father can fit in a tweet: He went to the
University of Waterloo for engineering, but became a CFA. When he made shrimp,
he kept the shells on. He had a moustache. He told me he’d see me Christmas.

I was so over it, so over his choices defining my story. It was finally over. I
was done and there were no more tears. Or so I thought, until years of pain
bubbled up as I stood with my feet in the sand of a foreign beach. I guess the
ghosts of our fathers always find a way to haunt us.

Over the years, when friends learn about my family history, they almost always
say the same thing: “I could never leave a kid behind like that.” To which I
reply, “I think my grandmother summed it up best when she used to tell me, ‘Your
father wasn’t a cruel man; he was a weak one.’”